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About us

Health Education and Improvement Wales (HEIW) is the strategic workforce body for NHS Wales. As a Special Health Authority, we have a unique contribution to make in addressing strategic and specialist workforce issues, making Wales a great place to train and work for our health and care staff and maximising the contribution of all professions and occupations through our statutory functions. These are:

 

Education and Training, Planning Commissioning and Delivery

We plan, commission, deliver and quality manage undergraduate and postgraduate education and training for a wide range of health professions. We are the Welsh Government’s development partner for the suite of healthcare apprenticeship frameworks. We spend the largest proportion of our budget on commissioning education and training for NHS Wales to ensure future supply.

 

Leadership Development

HEIW is responsible for setting the strategy, principles, and frameworks for leadership development across Wales, based on compassionate and collective leadership. Together with the commissioning and delivery of leadership development activity for key groups, we lead on succession planning and talent management for aspiring Directors and Chief Executives.

 

Workforce Strategy, Planning, and Intelligence

As well as providing strategic leadership for the development of workforce planning capacity across the NHS we play a lead role in the development of strategic workforce plans and the provision of analytical insight and intelligence to support the development of the current and future shape of the workforce.

 

Workforce Development and Transformation

We support workforce transformation and improvement to respond to significant service challenges, including skills development, role design, continuous professional development, and career pathway development.

 

Professional support for workforce and organisational development

We support the development of the workforce and organisational development profession within Wales.

 

Quality

The quality of our education and training, both direct and commissioned, is continuously improving and teams across the organisation work to implement and embed quality standards of national frameworks and strategies in HEIW work and throughout the wider system through our collaborative activity.

 

Careers and Widening Access

We promote health careers and the widening access agenda to ensure that opportunities to work in the health and care system are available to all. We work to include people in our communities that have valuable skills and experience that are currently under-represented in our workforce.

 

Retention

We are working with our system partners to embed health and wellbeing in working practices to drive retention.